Show HN: Eight-Bit Color Picker

Can you find any oranges in that color picker? Maybe 2. What about blues or reds? Pretty much the same. But you can find a ton of teals, purples, and pinks!

This is because producing naive permutations of fixed steps results mostly in muddy hue variance between the primaries. This is not the natural way we see color variance. It results in far too many unique hues and not enough shades of the "good" hues ("red", "orange", "yellow", etc.). We only really distinguish between 7-15 hues at a basic level, but then we are used to seeing many shades of those same hues.

In addition, because the way the permutations are created it would be a ton of work to figure out how to sort them by hue. And if you did, you would notice just how many hues there are (way too many to care about having so many).

A much better color picker will take just a handful of hues (again, 7-15 or so) and then present varying shades (lighter, usually, but also darker for more variance) of them. Another crucial factor is to make sure the color picker includes a row for all shades from black to white (which at least this color picker has done).

For an example of a color picker that does this well with just a handful of colors, see the Google docs color picker.[2] You'll notice how much more pleasing it is to the eye.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors

[2]: https://www.google.com/help/hc/images/docs/docs_1696586_colo...